FPGA tools under VMware or Parallels on a Mac?

Which vendor's FPGA development and USB download tools have people found to work reliably on a Mac or MacBook under either the Parallels or VMware virtualizers, running Windows XP, 2k or linux? If so, which virtualization environments worked with which USB FPGA download cables? How much memory was needed?

Thanks,

rhn A.T nicholson d.0.t C-o-M (IMHO & speaking only for myself)

Current Mac's (and many Wintel laptops) don't have serial or parallel ports; so I'm most interested in whether either VMware or Parallels on a MacBook works with, or has problems with, the USB download cables that one would get with the various FPGA vendors development kits. (e.g. I don't want to buy an FPGA dev kit, and find out I can't use it with any of my personal computers or laptops.)

Thanks,

rhn A.T nicholson d.0.t C-o-M (IMHO & speaking only for myself)

I have been using Xilinx FPGA tools (ISE and EDK) running on my MacBook using VMware Fusion and Ubuntu Linux. I works perfectly fine. See my blog :

The only problem I had was the USB driver. This is how I fixed it.

Sven

I could run all the latest Xilinx tools (EDK / ISE / Chipscope) without any problem on Windows XP with VMWare Fusion on my MAC..

-- parag

Quartus II 7.2 Web Ed. in a WinXP Pro SP2 VM on VMware Fusion, running on a 2 GiB Mac Book Pro works 100% perfect for me.

USB Blaster worked out of the box for me. I allocated 700 MiB to the VM but I haven't even tried to see how more or less affects performance.

There are a lot of benefits to running this in a VM, but the major drawback I see is that the VM has a non-trivial cpu load (= battery life) even when just idling. Obviously suspending it solves that.

Tommy